


For None Can Call Our Power To Account

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, F/M, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 14:24:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3137624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The difference between Natalia and Natasha is that one has heartsblood, and one does not; and one is dead, and one is not; and one has a critical weakness, and one does not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For None Can Call Our Power To Account

**Author's Note:**

  * For [talia_ae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/talia_ae/gifts).



> For Cass, on her birthday a couple of years ago, on the prompt Clint/Natasha 'we're just two people who are not in love right now'. Alain de Botton is the modern philosopher most likely to go on about this that I could think of; I couldn’t resist the Ties That Bind crack; I’m a fan of the movies but don’t know the comic canon and consequently went my own merry way with Natasha’s background; and Corazón Corazón is an actual TV show, but I only stole the title, because I thought it was cool. Title itself taken from Lady Macbeth’s famous speech about blood on her hands, because let’s face it, who exactly would stand in the way of Clint and Natasha working together?

            _I have a proposal for you_ , Clint had said, cocky and bright and obnoxious even with her gun tucked under his jaw, and Natasha (Natasha who tried to help the Winter Soldier escape, and failed – not Natalia, who is currently trying to kill an American sniper) had paused.

 

            _Tell me more_ , Natasha had said, and with those words she’d left Natalia behind forever, even though she hadn’t known it at the time.

 

            She thought at the time that that was why she felt a faint twinge of something, curling around the steady-beating red muscle of her heart - just the clean simple pain of changing sides, deliberately jettisoning familiarity. She’d been wrong.

 

            Natasha never knew that at the time. If she’d guessed correctly, if she’d allowed the word _heartsblood_ to cross her mind, she would have shot Clint Barton in the head out of fear and anger, and then what would the world look like?

 

And then who would she be?

 

            So it’s fortunate that she only guessed several years later, when she turned her back on a mission objective to rescue Barton. Of course, she fulfilled the objective anyway, if not on schedule and not in the manner Coulson had anticipated, but she had a choice between the objective and Barton’s life, and she chose Barton’s life. That realisation rattled her more than she likes to admit, and took time to get used to. Even if she managed to rationalise it for the benefit of her superiors in under thirty seconds.

 

            “The objective was temporary,” Natasha told Coulson, her voice as cool as her numb toes. Elegant court shoes aren’t meant for snow. “A short-term fix only. Barton is a long-term investment.”

 

            She went away to wash, the steaming water of the shower now sluicing the blood from her body ( _red in her ledger_ , Natasha thinks yet again, watching pale skin come clean under hotel shower gel, save where livid bruises and scrapes marked it: and that made her think, _how long can I hide this_?) Tonight she is – or no, it’s two in the morning, so yesterday  she was - an actress called Colette being pursued by a man with blood on his hands, dressed in navy blue and diamonds, and she felt fake until she realised Barton’s cover had been blown and she drew a knife and started to kill. She had as much blood on her hands as her mark did by the time she was done, and in the end when she chased him down he’d asked her what the difference was between a liar and an actress, and she’d said, as big a difference as there is between a spy and a soldier, and that would have been a giveaway if she hadn’t cut his throat before he could speak a word.

 

            That’s the kind of thing she would never have done, before she met Barton. Deliver a one-liner worthy of James Bond, something quick and meaningless and as unforgettable as the blood that will always shine as wet on her skin as the day it was first spilt, a trace of her presence. She was too worried about Barton, bleeding all over a security guard’s uniform and vulnerable, to be as silent and inhuman as usual. Too worried to let go of the fact that her mark had nearly succeeded in killing Barton, to tell herself that dying men don’t matter.

 

            Natasha’s neutrality is compromised. Standing in a shower in Eastern Europe she knows it, and she is not as afraid as she should be.

 

            She gets out of the shower and dries off, then drops her towel and looks herself in the mirror, looks herself in the eye.

 

            It takes a moment’s staring, but there: threads of silver, wrapping around her blue-green veins, barely visible under her skin. Threads of silver, tying her to someone, and Natasha knows now as well as she’d known when the first shot had hit Barton and she’d felt a hand squeeze her stomach sharp and ruthless that if she took hold of one of those threads and pulled, it would lead her straight to Barton.

 

            She can read her own lips, pale without lipstick, in the mirror. She can see her eyes wide and alive with something that’s not their usual shark-flat expression. She can feel herself shivering. It’s not just because of the cold, of the contrast between hot shower and cool air, of the tiles under her bare feet and the towel on the floor.

 

            Heartsblood. Her lips shape the word and her mind doesn’t take it in.

 

            _Heartsblood._

 

            “Fucking Barton,” Natasha says out loud, and feels something thrum bright along every single silver thread, every tie that’s wrapped around her heart.

 

 

            Natasha had a mother once. Her name was Irena. She’d been a Black Widow, before her forcible retirement, and her daughter was most politely called a child of science, an attempt to combine the best characteristics of Irena with those of a woman they called Odile – who was never quite as fast as Irena, or as gifted, or as deadly, but who lacked Irena’s emotions. Emotions had saved Nick Fury’s life, when Irena the Black Widow had spared a boy of eighteen when she was only a child herself, and Nick Fury had grown up to be a tremendous thorn in everyone’s side, up to and including his superiors. Emotions, as far as the Black Widows’ handlers were concerned, were things that needed to be purged, and if this was something that could be done at the genetic level, then the Black Widows would do it. They were forging the perfect weapon. Irena Mark II. Irena without the thoughts.

 

            Natasha never had a patronymic, was denied a matronymic, and her surname was chosen for her. It amused someone, somewhere, to call her Romanoff. She wonders now, now that there’s silver in her arteries where there never used to be, if her last name will be Barton one day, and if that would make Irena laugh.

 

            She answers both idle questions with a _no_. Her mother’s loyalty was far more uncomplicated than hers, and Natasha has grown into the corners of her name like a pair of shoes that were once uncomfortable. She will not change it.

 

            Irena. What about Irena? She was proud that her little Natalia promised to be _the_ Black Widow, not _a_ Black Widow, so proud. But she also accepted that Natalia’s emotions were buried so deep by the childhood training Irena gave her over to, and maybe by something to do with her other mother, that Natalia would probably never touch them. Anger, betrayal, love, grief – things Natalia would never feel, and when Natalia was a baby Irena, oh, Irena, who pushed the boundaries a few too many times and had the scars to show for it... she thought this might be best.

 

            She only told Natalia about heartsblood on a whim. She never thought Natalia would ever find someone whose happiness was inextricably tied up in her own, who understood her on every level, whose spoke to her very soul.

 

            Probably she didn’t think Natalia had a soul.

 

Maybe, thinks Natasha, staring at herself in the mirror, maybe she was right.  But Natasha is not Natalia. Natalia is long dead, and so is Irena.    

 

            Natasha has been touched by heartsblood, and she suspects she is the very last to know.

 

 

            “Oh that,” Barton says casually when she asks, as much of a total ass as he has always has been, and shrugs. It pains him. “Yeah, I knew. Wasn’t sure you did, though.”

 

            “Jackass,” Natasha says. “You could have told me.”

 

             Barton physically cannot grin in a way that is not shit-eating, even when he has three slowly closing bullet holes in him. Natasha felt every shot like it was meant for her. “Oh, so you would have believed me?”

 

            “No,” Natasha says without hesitation. “Be serious for a minute, if you can. What do we do about this?”

 

            “Do?” Barton says, blue eyes suddenly serious, battered face still. “We don’t have to do anything or tell anyone. Nobody needs to know.”

 

            Maybe he’s right. They work together constantly, see no-one regularly except for each other. Their bond could be an advantage in some situations. Because of it, Natasha is as aware of Barton as her own right hand.

 

            “Coulson,” she points out.

 

            “Knew before I did,” Barton says. His smile is twisted and almost sad. “I thought I was damaged goods, Natasha. Too broken for this.”

 

            “I _am_ damaged goods,” Natasha retorts, “and clearly, I’m not too broken for this,” and there’s another thing she hadn’t thought of. If this can still happen to her, if she can still have the unconditional love and devotion, the perfect understanding that heartsblood implies...

 

            ... perhaps it’s worth trying to wipe the red out of her ledger, after all. She’ll never get it all out, but one day she might be able to weigh it in the balance.

 

            “Sleep, Barton,” she says, and turns off the light.

 

            “We’re tied to each other by a metaphysical bond of true love and similar bullshit,” Barton grumbles from his hospital bed in the darkness. “You could at least call me Clint.”

 

 

            Normal humans don’t see if others have heartsblood unless they look, and because it’s rude, they don’t look. Natasha looks sometimes, in order to know, or because there’s something off about a person that she needs to quantify in case it turns out to be latent villainy, or Loki, or both. Steve Rogers is very off in Natasha’s vision, but then, his ties – enough for two people, and Natasha wonders who owned the ones that didn’t twine round Peggy Carter - are visible to just about anyone, waving loose and desolate, torn under his skin, and that accounts for it. Tony Stark doesn’t even know his ties are there, but they are, wrapped smooth and perfect around Pepper, who has an inkling that her own silver strands are curled calmly around Tony’s heart, but will never be quite sure until Tony sees for himself. Jane Foster and Thor are clear as daylight; being around each other causes actual glowing, which is either because Thor is Asgardian, or because they are both transparent when it comes to what they’re feeling.

 

            Because Thor is both transparent and Asgardian, he cottons to Natasha and Clint the first time he sees them in a room together.

 

            “My friends!” he booms.

 

            “Agh, fuck,” Clint says, or rather mumbles, from where he is pressed into Thor’s manly bosom. Natasha saw the Asgardian Hug Juggernaut coming and vaulted the breakfast bar before it hit, but Clint had his back to Thor, and is suffering for it.

 

            “I was not aware you had entered into a bond akin to that of the Lady Jane and myself!”

 

            Nice one, Thor, Natasha thinks, and rolls her eyes.

 

            Tony slides his indoor sunglasses down his nose. “Wait, wait, wait.” He squints at both Natasha and Clint. “Holy fucking Asimov, you’re not kidding, are you? They _are_.”

 

            “We didn’t enter into anything,” Clint grumbles, “it just sort of happened.”

 

            “Congratulations. I’m very pleased for you both,” Steve says politely, and Natasha can see a flash of pain on his face. Peggy and who else? she asks herself.

 

Steve swallows, and adds, “Should we expect a wedding, or is this another-”

 

            “ _No_!” Clint and Natasha yelp in perfect unison, and Natasha takes on the mantle of explaining, because Clint is still dangling in the Asgardian Hug (tm) and there doesn’t appear to be much he can do about it, since Thor has forgotten that ordinary mortals need ground under their feet.

 

            “Just because you have heartsblood doesn’t mean you should get married, Steve, being tied to each other doesn’t actually imply liking each other forever. Heartsblood can go wrong, ask any divorce lawyer. And anyway, we’re not _in love_ ,” she says, “we’re just...”

 

            “We just are,” Clint says, dropping out of Thor’s grasp and leaving his shirt behind. Natasha can appreciate that rumpled, slightly embarrassed, slightly cross, shirtless view any day of the week.

 

            “We just are,” Natasha repeats.

 

            “So when you said you cognitively recalibrated Clint,” Tony begins, a familiar glint in his eye.

 

            “I mean I found him in a small passageway in the Helicarrier and beat the shit out of him,” Natasha says smoothly.

 

            Tony blinks. “Cool. Whatever floats your boat, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

 

            Pepper strolls into the living area with briefings under her arm and a mug of coffee. She looks bright, fresh and calm. Natasha admires her poise the same way she admires Clint’s skill with a bow. “Is this about Clint and Natasha’s heartsblood?”

 

            “Yes,” Steve says. “Do you think Miss Lewis would mind if I asked –”

 

            “I think if you asked Darcy about heartsblood you would get every episode ever of _Corazón Corazón_ , and that would be a terrible idea,” Pepper says. “The Wikipedia article is quite good as a basic overview, and there’s an Alain de Botton essay on the subject you might be interested in, as well as a book by a Women’s Studies professor at Columbia on modern attitudes to heartsblood that came out just last month. It’s called _The Ties That Bind_. Very interesting.”

 

            Steve looks slightly ill, the same way he did when someone (Darcy) tried to explain the Cold War to him in thirty seconds flat. Natasha suspects he would have preferred _Corazón Corazón_.

           

            “How do you know?” Natasha says.

 

            Pepper looks round, pale eyebrows raised, blue eyes guileless as ever. “I caught a glimpse once when you were Natalie Rushman. And then when Clint turned up...” She shrugs, as if to say, _it was obvious_.

 

            It would be obvious to exactly no-one in the world but Pepper Potts.

 

            “Huh,” Clint says, and looks at Natasha, and Natasha looks back, and they shrug and go back to eating cereal, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder.

 

            On the whole, Natasha is glad she didn’t kill Clint when they met. Natalia couldn’t say the same for Barton, but that doesn’t matter. Natalia never had silver spinning through her blood, and Natalia’s dead.

 

            Long live Natasha.


End file.
